Tim wrote:And that, my friends, was your course in Political Bias 101.
(No offense, Brad, but that wasn't exactly a balanced overview.)
Is it not? I just repeated things the conservative party mps and candidates ACTUALLY SAID. I said I was paraphrasing two of them (the latter was reported front page of the province when I was living on Holdom in Burnaby.... so between 2004 and 2007), but the other two, you may have noticed, were in quotation marks. Put them in quotation marks in google and you will find the folks who said them.
Stockwell Day DOES believe dinosaurs coexisted with humans 6000 years ago. He WROTE A SCHOOL CURRICULUM on it. Incidentally, he is now our minister of international trade. How is that politically biased to point it out? Warren Kinsela wasn't called that when he pulled out a Barney doll on television and pointed out that it was the only dinosaur to coexist with humans during that election.
Are these people representative of the party? Well, technically the are. They're party representatives. Are their opinions representative of the ideals of the party? Certainly not the ones they post on their website, but of the caucus, I believe they are. Some, like Harper, are (and this hurts me to say) smart enough to know when to keep their mouths shut. I mean it: wiki the major players in the conservatives today and find me one that hasn't been criticized for antisemetic, anti-homosexual, racist, sexist or (please excuse the term) 'crazy religious' (on the order of Stockwell Day or that other religions don't have a place in Canada) comments.
It is a continuing problem that the party has dealt with constantly in the past and, as evidenced by Harper refusing to allow some of his candidates contact with the media or to participate in pre-election townhall meetings where they might let something slip, continues.
Now Tim, I don't blame you if you find the facts I've pointed out here shocking - these are the leaders of our country that I am talking about. But remember Harper's first term. He made it a campaign promise. A campaign promise for crying out loud: that he would repeal the laws that allowed for gay marriage in Canada. A politician who is supposed to support the freedoms of the people he is called to represent was elected with the promise that he would take away the rights of some Canadians and return them to a place of second class citizenry. Now that's a hot topic and I know people love to debate the morality of gay marriage, but ignore the context for a minute and remember that what he promised to do, and thank God he couldn't: was erase people's rights. This is the man in charge of these people: talk about a bias.
It should be said that there are a lot of people in the conservative party and certainly a lot of conservative supporters who don't believe that the Jews are trying to take over the country, or that homosexuality is destructive to society, or that we need to stop letting minorities immigrate here, or that it is the place of government to regulate people's religious beliefs. Any group of people has good and bad people in it. But of many of the party's leaders, look for yourself: if it looks like a duck, and talks like a duck, it's a duck. Or at very least a racist loon.